Mahler

Mahler

Gustave Mahler (1860-1911) was born in Bohemia on July 7, 1860. Throughout his music career his main goal was to be a great conductor. Like a baseball player working his way through the minor league system, Mahler started in a small city and moved up from there. His path led him through Bad Hall, Laibach, Olmütz, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, and Vienna. After ten years as director of the Vienna Court Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic, he went to New York to direct the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Although he accomplished great results, Mahler was a very stern and demanding conductor and was not very popular with many musicians in these orchestras. In fact, his tense relationships with the orchestras led to his dismissal in Vienna and New York.

Because Mahler's concert schedule was so busy, he only had time to compose in the summer months. He did most of this work in a small cabin in a secluded part of the Austrian mountains. All of Mahler's great compositions are orchestral pieces. He wrote nine symphonies and several songs for vocal soloist and orchestra.

Mahler expanded the size of the orchestra even further than Wagner. The first performance of his eighth symphony included 171 musicians and 858 singers and has appropriately been called the "Symphony of a Thousand." Even though he had such a large number of musicians to work with, he included periods of chamber music in his symphonies. Mahler frequently composed short sections of music in which only a few wind instruments play, followed by sections in which the entire orchestra plays with mighty brass and percussion pounding out intense rhythms.

Mahler's music has many great contrasts in tone color, volume, style, and emotion. He often quoted folk songs, marches, fanfares, waltzes, and other dances. He set several great poems to music in his orchestral songs. His Kindertotenlieder (Children's Death Songs) are based on Friedrich Rückert's (1788-1866) poem about the pain and suffering of losing two children to scarlet fever. It is an awful coincidence that shortly after Mahler completed this work, his own daughter died of scarlet fever.

• Gustav Mahler : The Symphonies by Constantin Floros, Vernon Wicker (Translator), Jutta Wicker (Translator)
• The Diaries, 1898-1902 by Alma Mahler, Antony Beaumont (Editor), Susanne Rode-Breymann (Editor)

Restored text, unchanged, from the Wayback Machine capture of February 24, 2004.